On Notions of Truth in Photography: Semiotics and the Stereograph by Gunnar Swanson ©1991–2010 Gunnar Swanson. All rights reserved. This document is provided for the personal use of visitors to gunnarswanso.com. Distributing in any form requires the permission of Gunnar Swanson. Permission will almost surely be granted but it is required nonetheless. Any copying or redistribution requires attribution and the retention of copyright notice. On Notions of Truth in Photography: Semiotics and the Stereograph by Gunnar Swanson Categorical statements about the nature of a medium are always made in peril of being parochial. There is, however, something about photography that compels us to categorize, if only about photography’s relation to its subject matter. The optical/mechanical/chemical basis for photography seems to separate it from the strictly handmade media, inviting generalization about its depiction of truth and reality. It seems obvious that, in a way different from a painting being more than just pigment on cloth, there is something more to a photograph than just a collection of metallic salts and pigments on paper. In the mid nineteenth century photography was often assumed to be as an act of God, with human intervention purely technical in nature. In his 1859 The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “we owe the creations of our new art” (photography) to “the sun itself.”1 Truth, it would seem, should be as much inherent in God’s photography as it is in His other works. This idea of natural intervention was not a new one—twenty-one years earlier, Louis Daguerre had stated in an investment notice that the “daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature…[it] gives her the power to reproduce herself.”2 The seduction of the apparent “realism” of the photograph has long obscured issues of subjectivity and intent. In The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, Holmes compared the Daguerreotype to a mirror in which one can see one of the “films” or “effigies” cast off by any solid object. Although one might like to consider O.W. Holmes an intelligent and scientific man and assume he was using such constructs from Democritus of Abdera (“the Laughing Philosopher”) for illustrative purposes only, there is no indication that Holmes’ mirrors placed at various increments from the exfoliating object seemed to him an artificial notion; i.e., we might assume he considered the surreal image of miles of mirrors sufficiently educational to overcome 1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” 1859 Atlantic Monthly magazine as reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.) Classic Essays on Photography, Lecte’s Island, New Haven CT 73 2 Louis Daguerre in a notice circulated to attract investors, 1838, as quoted in Susan Sontag On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., New York, NY 188 feelings of amusement or absurdity, but there is no indication that he recognized the fact that a viewer’s position and a mirror’s size, placement, and very nature affect and limit the image every bit as much as the seen object’s cast-off effigies. While we can empathize with Holmes’ wonder at the railroad, the telegraph, chloroform, and the Daguerreotype, in his enthusiasm he abandoned any common sense view of existence. An “idea of reality” that “we clasp…with our minds” neatly replaces reality itself, to the point that he rejects the “use” of “matter as a visible object…except as a mould on which form is shaped” and even suggests that illusions of form “must” become like money: “promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature.”3 Even Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work on semiotics predated Ferdinand de Saussure’s by nearly half a century, accepted the notion of the photograph as somehow “natural.” He divided signs into icons (where there is physical resemblance between the signifier and the referent, such as a photograph of a person), indices (where there is a causal relationship between the signifier and the referent, such as a footprint of the person), and symbols (what Saussure called “sign proper,” where the signifier is arbitrary and purely cultural, such as the person’s name).4 Peirce claimed that icons and indexes “assert nothing” and that only symbols are in the “declarative mood.”5 Late in this century Roland Barthes focused (pardon the expression) the discussion of the semiotic of the icon further. In Camera Lucida Barthes wrote that “The photographic referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call the ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and most often are ‘chimeras.’ Contrary to imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.”6 Thus, according to Barthes, the essential truth of a photograph is “Reference.” Certainly that common sense notion of an inextricable union of signifier and referent has been at the heart of the practical use of photography almost from its beginnings. (Sometimes, as in aerial reconnaissance photography, the death of the photographically identified Communards, or mug shots, even O.W. Holmes’ bizarre 3 Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Classic Essays on Photography, 81 4 Charles Sanders Peirce, Selected Writings, 1966, 1958, Dover, New York, NY (Orignally published as Values in a Universe of Change) 5 Author’s class notes from Visual Semiotics class, California Institute of the Arts, fall 1991 (If you can confirm or refute this, please email me at [email protected]) 6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 1980, translation 1981 Hill and Wang, New York, NY notion of photograph-as-currency may have some appeal.) Excepting questions of possible deliberate fakery (Gardner’s “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,” images of Communard atrocities, and Lee Harvey Oswald with his rifle, for instance), “photographic evidence” is tantamount to proof. Even when the quality is so poor as to be unreadable (as in flying saucer, Loch Ness monster, and “grassy knoll” shooter photos), or, in fact, not actually the photographic analog of any part of the spectrum (Kirilian “photographs,” for instance), the existence of a “photograph” implies the existence of a referent and thus, it seems to many, the proof of something. Technical manipulation, although perhaps intuitively antithetical to this line of reasoning, often amplifies the “scientific” perception of photography. Frances Galton based his eugenics theories on his ideas of racially and morality superior “types,” and composite photographs gave a real face (albeit often without ears or fine features) to The Criminal, The Jew, et al.7 “Computer enhancement” is accepted by the public without questioning of the nature of the “enhancement” algorithms. The computer, after all, is the perfect tool for breaking codes and uncovering secrets. The naiveté of the idea of photograph-as-plain-truth seems to most of us as obvious as the unified photographic signifier and referent. These two common sense “givens” lead almost syllogistically to the photography-as-a-secret-language theory. The secret language theory includes photographic boosterism, typified by Moholy-Nagy’s call for photographic literacy,8 as well as the outright conspiratorial such as Wilson Brian Key’s contention that liquor advertisers airbrush monsters on ice cubes in their ads to encourage the self destruction of their alcoholic audiences.9 Wider (and less laughable) conspiracies are identified by Stuart Ewen in his histories of the shaping of consumer culture by the (often photographic) images of advertising.10 In All Consuming Images Ewen extends Holmes’ argument to style in general: “With remarkable, if unwitting clarity, Oliver Wendell Holmes had laid out the contours by which the phenomenon of style operates in the world today. Holmes was writing of photography, yet his perception that people would soon navigate the world, skin it of visible images, and market those images inexpensively to people, reflected a keen understanding of what, in the twentieth century, would stand as a palpable indicator of material progress. For people who, in another epoch, would have been unable to afford it, the acquisition of style represented a symbolic leap from the constraints of mere subsistence.”11 7 Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” October 39, Winter 1986 (a revised version appears in The Contest of Meaning ed. by Richard Bolton 1989, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 8 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light,” Telehor 1,2, 1936 translated in Lyons, Photographers on Photography, 34 9 Wilson Brian Key, Subliminal Seductions, 1973 Prentice Hall, New York, NY 10 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Conciousness, 1976 McGraw-Hill, New York, NY and Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen Channels of Desire, 1982 McGraw-Hill, New York, NY 11 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images, 1988, Basic Books, New York, NY pp. 25–26 Although he applies Holmes’ arguments beyond photography, Ewen devotes much time in his classes at Hunter College to decoding or deconstructing the photographic images of advertising.12 He encourages his students to examine the physical relationships, dress, and other associations of the people and products depicted. From his techniques it can be inferred that Ewen believes that intent and thus the “real” message of photographs is apparent to the close observer. The secret language is readily decipherable, as insidious but less closely guarded than Key’s monstrous ice cubes. It is not clear how Ewen views the conspiratorial mechanism. While ordering beasts for ice cubes is clearly a conscious decision, the appropriation of signifiers, arrangement of models and products, and creation of images to enhance power relationships and sell a myth of fulfillment through style could conceivably be done unconsciously by photographic crews steeped in modern consumer culture.